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Social Media News | The Professor’s Pick

LinkedIn’s publishing platform is to go global with a number of localised landing pages.

The publishing initiative, which opened up to LinkedIn members last year, allows users to share their thoughts in the form of articles and blogs. Prior to 2014, the publishing option was only available to established influencers such as entrepreneurs and public figures.

Having only been available in English until now, the LinkedIn publishing platform has now launched in Portuguese with plans to roll out to German and French in the coming months. More languages are expected to follow.

To date, one million people have published over three million posts on the platform.

Commenting on the expansion, a LinkedIn spokesperson said: “As professionals, we all have our own perspective on the world around us, but until recently, we didn’t always have the right platform to share it on.

“That’s why it came as no surprise that when we made it possible for all English speaking members to publish long-form posts on LinkedIn, it quickly became one of the fastest growing features on the site. Today, LinkedIn has become known as the definitive professional publishing platform around the world.”

LinkedIn introduces personal brand monitoring tools

In other LinkedIn news, the professional networking site has created a tool to help users measure how successful they are at building their own brand on the platform.

Examining how effective users are at engaging other members, ‘Social Selling’ monitors user activity and provides them with a score out of 100.

According to a LinkedIn blog: “By checking out your SSI {Social Selling Index}, you’ll see how you stack up against your industry peers and your network on LinkedIn. Further, you can see how you are performing on each of the four elements of social selling — establishing your professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships — and track your progress over time to help you understand how you’re improving.”

By accessing a user-friendly dashboard, professionals will be able to spot where they are strong on LinkedIn, and where they need improvement.

Previously, the brand monitoring tool was only available to paying LinkedIn users, but has now been rolled out universally. To check out your dashboard go to https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi

Reddit user growth up 890%

Despite the recent controversy surrounding the platform, Reddit has revealed that the site witnessed a whopping 890% increase in monthly growth in July. According to the entertainment, social networking and news website, Reddit received 195,209,169 unique visitors last month, despite the revolt over restrictions and personnel.

Whether the increase in user numbers reflects an ongoing interest in the platform or is merely the result of short-term curiosity flamed by the controversy is yet to be seen.

Pinterest strives for diversity

In a blog post last week, a Pinterest spokesperson revealed that the company has established a number of goals to help it achieve a more diverse workforce by 2016. These include:

Implementing a form of affirmative action where at least one person from an underrepresented background and one female candidate is interviewed for every open leadership position.

While Pinterest believes that it has made some “modest progress” over the last 12 months, it admitted that “we have more work to do”. By sharing these goals publicly, Pinterest is holding itself accountable to meaningful change.

Facebook defends video theft accusations

Earlier this week, American vlogger Hank Green launched a scathing attack on Facebook claiming that it is “lying, cheating and stealing” in order to dominate the lucrative video advertising market. The YouTube star, who has a following of more than 2.5 million, claimed that the social media giant is deliberately leveraging stolen videos in order to inflate its video stats.

Hitting back at the allegations, Facebook has said that it takes intellectual property very seriously, stating that: “This is not new to Facebook. We have a number of measures in place to address potential infringements on our service. For years we’ve used the Audible Magic system to help prevent unauthorized video content. We also have reporting tools in place to allow content owners to report potential copyright infringement, and upon receiving a valid notice we remove unauthorized content. We also suspend accounts of people with repeated IP violations when appropriate.”

Acknowledging that there is “a significant technical challenge to solve”, Facebook added that it is exploring new ways to help IP owners identify and manage potential content infringement.